Chuck Hagel was confirmed at the end of February 2013. He didn’t even have a year and a half in his new position before becoming a fall guy.

That must be some kind of record.

And Hagel is pathetically embracing his role. The sad sack who stumbled incompetently through his hearings now stumbles through the motions of taking on the responsibility for the Bergdahl deal, ever since it was announced that it’s his fault.

Hagel, unlike Shinseki, probably won’t pay the ultimate penalty. Not unless Bowe Bergdahl’s first words on camera are, “I love Jihad more than I love peanut butter and jelly”. But the decline has started.

Obama has two kinds of appointees. Those he connects with and will fight for, like Susan Rice, and the expendables, like Hagel. He will fight for them out of ego, but he will sacrifice them if there’s a threat.

Susan Rice might be sent out to lie, but she won’t be sent out to fall on her sword. Chuck Hagel now knows exactly where he stands. Even the famously dimwitted ex-senator can’t be too stupid to realize his place in the scheme of things.

Obama had more respect for Panetta and Petraeus than he does for Hagel.

“We didn’t handle some of this right,” Hagel admitted to the House Armed Services Committee, toward the end of the first public hearing on the prisoner exchange.

In his opening remarks, Hagel also said both he and President Obama were on board with the decision — amid some confusion in Washington over who technically approved the trade. “I want to make one fundamental point — I would never sign any document or make any agreement … that I did not feel was in the best interests of this country,” Hagel said. “Nor would the president of the United States, who made the final decision with the full support of his national security team.”

Is Hagel covertly passing the buck back? He just might be. But don’t make the mistake of thinking Hagel is smart. Ask him a question about a talking point and he folds like Hillary after three margaritas.

He said there was “no direct evidence of any direct involvement in their direct attacks on the United States or any of our troops,” though they were combatants and “part of planning.”

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, asked him to clarify.

“So your point was they didn’t pull the trigger, but they were senior commanders of the Taliban military who directed operations against the United States?” he asked.

As the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution approaches some of the former students who participated in its Red Guard terror have been trying to make amends to their victims. If China’s former leftist fanatics feel some remorse for the atrocities they participated in, the same can’t be said of their American counterparts.

Even as the Cultural Revolution was dying down in China, it flared up in the United States. The Weather Underground drew inspiration from China’s Red Terror. Their founding manifesto cited the Red Guard as a model for a “mass revolutionary movement.”

Bill Ayers, among others, had signed a letter, “Long live People’s China. Love live Comrade Mao.”

The American counterparts of China’s Red Guard remain largely unrepentant because here the Cultural Revolution never ended. Instead it went mainstream. Its members were never disavowed and their acts of terror continue to be celebrated, minimized and whitewashed by a left that finds them alternately embarrassing and thrilling.

The terrorists became celebrities and the radicals became part of the system and set the rules. There was less violence, but more authoritarianism. Instead of carrying on a futile campaign of bombings and bank robberies, the radicals used the vast wealth and power of the system to train the next generation of the Red Guard. And that next generation did the same thing.

Barack Obama, a child of the Cultural Revolution

Each wave of the Cultural Revolution in the United States has eroded civil rights and illiberally undermined a liberal society. Though the Red Guards have chosen to work within the system, they are animated by an unmistakeable contempt and hatred for the country and its institutions. Their endgame has not changed. Only their tactics have.

Barack Obama, a child of the Cultural Revolution, is the very model of a modern Red Guard. The mark of a successful revolution is that the revolutionaries no longer need extreme rhetoric since they can do anything they want. The Weather Underground engaged in extreme rhetoric and actions. Obama dispenses with the extreme rhetoric and gets right down to the extreme actions. He is calculating enough to avoid the verbal vindictiveness of an Ayers or a Wright, but he still chose them as his mentors.

America under the Red Guards is run by liberals without liberalism. […….]

The United States has gone from a society that sought to create equality through neutral spaces that nullified authoritarian power relationships and restored a natural state of individuality to a society of authoritarian power relationships that promise equality by redistributing poverty and oppression. There is no room for neutral spaces in such a system. No room for withdrawal or dissent.

[…….]

The virtue of the creative individual was displaced by the Red Guard’s virtue of outrage. Its members mistake the thrill of abusing others for the rightness of a moral crusade. They celebrate the elimination of all restrictions that prevent them from punishing their victims as a revolutionary act.

This form of crowdsourced political terror by elites and their pet mobs isn’t new. It’s only new to the United States.

Political outrage is the supreme virtue of both the American and Chinese Red Guard. The denunciations leading from that outrage show off their revolutionary commitment to everyone.

The lines of scapegoats paraded through the media for some petty crime against political correctness are a modern digital version of the Red Guard’s denunciations and humiliations. The politics and the poisoned power motives are the same. The only difference is that the Red Guard lacks the license to commit real violence, as of now, and must instead settle for economic and social violence.

The virtue of outrage leads to a state of authoritarian lawlessness. Legislatures and laws are replaced with an alliance between the executive authority of Barack Obama and the Red Guard activists. The activists demand, the media manufactures outrage and Obama uses executive orders to deliver. These totalitarian antics of a new Cultural Revolution are celebrated as populist, when they are really the Machiavellian show that the leftist elite puts on for the people.

The Red Guard, whether it’s the Occupiers or Barack Obama, abide by no rules except those of their own ideology

When outrage displaces the process of the law, what remains is either authoritarianism or anarchy. And despite the occasional Circle-A embroidered on a pricey jacket, the progressive Red Guard are not anarchists. What they are after is not less authority, but more of it. Not more freedom, but less of it. Their rhetoric about banks and corporations disguises what they intend for the rest of us.

They are not fighting against power. They are fighting for power.

The Red Guard, whether it’s the Occupiers or Barack Obama, abide by no rules except those of their own ideology. The United States Constitution and the rule of law mean nothing to them. The rules of their ideology are expressed formally in private, but publicly as outrage or empathy.

The left understands that Americans have a great deal of antipathy to words like “Socialism” and relies on emotion instead putting over its agenda over through individual stories that engage audiences emotionally. Beyond that its rhetoric relies on “modern” and “sensible” cultural signifiers aimed at winning over the same middle class audiences that it inwardly hates.

[…….]

Liberal societies are sustained by reason. The momentum of emotion has no room for argument or dissent. There is no possibility of negotiation or compromise. Everything exists in black and white. Reason is not even a factor. There is nothing to debate. Either you agree or you are the enemy.

Under the rule of the Red Guard, rights do not transcend the ruling ideology. Freedom of speech and thought are only provided to those who say and think the right things. The same is true for all else. There are no rights, as we know them anymore. Only a binding mandate of social justice. The right to speak your mind or donate to a political cause is valid only if it serves that mandate.

The Constitution is not an absolute. There are no absolutes except social justice. A right either serves the cause of social justice, in which case it can be dispensed with since it will be protected by social justice anyway. Or it obstructs it, in which case it must be destroyed. The same is true of all laws.

The Living Constitution is not a fixed legal structure, but a mandate for equality. Justice is not blind. She’s a community organizer coming out on the side of the social justice faction against the greedy and ignorant majority. The entire system, political, cultural and legal, is a means of enforcing the mandate. Its administrators are an elitist faction whose contempt for the people leads them to believe that tyranny is the only way to equality.

[…….]

The artificial and extraordinary force of the Red Guard is a perverse parody of mob rule. Our Red Guard, like many in China’s Red Guard, are the sons and daughters of the elites. Their violence is a ferocious assault of the top against the middle in the name of the low. They manufacture an elitist populism in order to call for despotism.

In New York City, the sons and daughters of the elite stopped shaving, set up camping tents opposite Wall Street and clamored for the radical change that their parents were already busy implementing. Their 99% sloganeering, a group that few of their parents belonged to, was a massive distraction from an alliance between political and commercial elites to ration health care and displace the working class that had generated an authentic populist movement, which like all authentic populist movements rejected the authoritarian rule of a chief executive, rather than defending and endorsing it.

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street, like every modern manifestation of the Red Guard in the United States, and like the original Red Guard, was a cynical power move by a ruling elite. The fake populism of 1 percenter brats shrieking about income inequality while campaigning to destroy the middle class and what’s left of the working class was true despotism.

The new Cultural Revolution is aimed at shrinking the already narrow power and prosperity of the majority for the sake of the minority. Not the minority of racial or ethnic minorities, but the minority of elites that is determined to get its way by any means necessary.

When George Washington warned of the political system being distorted by a “small but artful and enterprising minority of the community”, he certainly didn’t mean it in racial terms. He was warning about a radical left eager to align with the French Revolution in the name of a greater revolution that would transcend nations, tear down borders, dispose of morals and impose despotism in the name of liberty.

The 50th anniversary of China’s Cultural Revolution will coincide with a national election in the United States that will serve in part as a final referendum on the Red Guard reign of the previous eight years. Like the Chinese, Americans will be forced to confront the ruin of their institutions, the polarization of their society and the victims of the Red Guard’s political inquisitions.

To the race hustlers, it is always about race, otherwise they are out of a very lucrative business.

by Daniel Greenfield

A few years ago, Newsweek’s glossy cover asked “Is Your Baby Racist?” The baby looking back at supermarket shoppers, airline passengers waiting for their flight and patients in the dental office had blue eyes.

The labeling of racists as white has itself become a racial stereotype. And it’s not an accidental stereotype.

Behind the left’s support for affirmative action is the belief that white racism is the only kind of racism that exists. Black racism they insist is really called “reverse racism” and is a myth made up by white people.

It’s not that the left believes that affirmative action isn’t racist. It’s that it believes that there is no such thing as racism against white people. Like the Knockout Game or white students who qualify on merit but can’t get into college because of racial diversity quotas; it’s an invalid category. A myth.

And if it’s a myth, then there’s nothing wrong with a little racial violence or a few racial preferences.

[…..]

The left is delusional, but it isn’t completely insane. It doesn’t deny that black hate crimes can take place. It won’t even deny the occasional act of institutional discrimination. And that is where sanity parts ways with insanity because the left does not recognize racism except as a collective phenomenon.

The debate over affirmative action is about the collective and the individual.

“It cannot be entertained as a serious proposition that all individuals of the same race think alike,” Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the Schuette v. BAMN decision that permits a ban on racial affirmative action discrimination in Michigan. But that’s the exact premise that the left operates under. Or rather it doesn’t care whether members of a race think alike. It still chooses to address them as a group or not at all.

Racism, to the left, exists systemically. It exists institutionally. It exists collectively, but not individually.

All white people are racist. All black people are victims of racism. Any events to the contrary are exceptions to the rule. Racism can only exist one way between the majority and the minority.

Anything else is a mythical ‘reverse racism’.

Conservatives view people as individuals. Leftists view them as parts of a system. To a conservative, racism is something that happens between individuals. To a leftist, it’s the attribute of a system. Trying to convince a leftist that black racism exists or that affirmative action is racist is like trying to convince him that some of the cells in his body are plotting against him.

He doesn’t see individuals, he sees a system.

The debate over affirmative action is really the debate over whether we see people as individuals or cells, whether the white and black students who want to be seen as individuals will prevail, or whether the totalitarian left with its insistence on viewing them as differently colored marbles in a single system will continue to get its way.

Similarly in politics, conservatives reach out to people who agree with their policies, regardless of race, leading to less diverse, but more intellectually robust groups, while liberals form racial coalitions. Liberals accuse conservatives of racism because they assume that they are not a coalition of individuals, but a racial collective, just like them. The lack of individual conservative racism occasionally registers, but is not processed because only the system matters.

[……]

That is what the left, with its obsession with systems, cannot see and cannot cope with it. The Great Society failed miserably because we were a great society all along. We weren’t a great society because we were perfect, but because we were constantly striving to better ourselves as individuals.

And it is this trait which affirmative action and the left’s collectivist view undermines.

Systems don’t reject racism. Individuals do.

It is this fundamental truth that Newsweek’s obsession with baby racism and the indoctrination of white privilege are meant to combat. Their collective message is that individuals are products of the system, puppets of their biology, forever damned by an original sin of racism that so thoroughly pervades every part of their being and mental state that they can never escape it.

Not unless the system changes.

That was the left’s defeatist totalitarian response to class. The failure of its systems of economic management and the success of capitalism destroyed its credibility on class. The idea that the working class can never escape poverty under private enterprise has been buried as thoroughly as the statues of Marx and Lenin.

But instead of rethinking its paradigm, the left substituted race for class. The working class could succeed under private enterprise , but only as long as it was white.

And that’s still wrong.

Race, like class, is not a systemic problem. It’s not a problem of the system, but of the individual. There is no single collective solution, only the solutions that individuals find for themselves. We are not a nation divided between black and white, or between the even more absurd formulation of the colorless whites and the ‘people of color’.

We are individuals. We always were.

Affirmative action denies that race is an individual experience. [……..]

It denies the individual. It denies his identity, his worth and his agency. It puts the system above the individual and takes away the rights of everyone, of all races, genders and assorted identities.

The left is obsessed with the ‘whiteness’ of the system. Its obsession is not only racist, but it replaces an open system in which people can change and are changing… with a closed system under which they cannot. [……..]

The system doesn’t reward aspiration, it rewards only outrage. It is interested only in promoting the collective force that keeps its wheels turning, not the individual counter-clockwise rotation of dissent.

The white experience of black racism is illegitimate because it turns ‘against’ the system. And so it’s a conversation that has to be shut down and an experience that has to be delegitimized with accusations of white privilege. White privilege is an artifact of systemic thinking that does not recognize individuals. It’s an attack by the political immune system of an ideology that has absolutely no room for non-conforming experiences.

What will determine the outcome of the affirmative action debate and the larger debates over race and class is whether we approach them as individuals or as parts of a system. Americans resist being treated like interchangeable parts of a system, but the individual narratives that the left uses so effectively are cover for systemic approaches and systemic solutions.

The left has responded to institutionalized racism with institutionalized racism until it became the very racist institution that it was once fighting against. Institutions don’t fight racism, they create it. The most compelling argument against the left’s collective racial policies has always been the individual.

The tactic was an old one, unleash violence and then claim to be the only ones who could bottle it up.

by Daniel Greenfield

The Black Hitler was a Chicago community organizer who moved to New York. Somewhere along the way he picked up a gold lined cape, a purple turban and a stepladder on which he used to stand while giving speeches outside the stores of Harlem’s dwindling Jewish community.

The cape and the turban were combined with Nazi style military shirt and jackboots, for the quixotic uniform of a man who is remembered today as a pioneering labor leader– but was known back then as the Black Hitler.A dagger thrust through his belt completed the ensemble.

In his stepladder speeches, Black Hitler declared that he was the only man who could stop the Jews, accusing them of spreading filth and disease, and called on his followers to tear out the tongues of any Jew they met.

[…..]

Speeches like these earned him the title, ‘Black Hitler’ and intimidated local businesses into hiring workers from his own private labor union.

The enterprising community organizer dubbed himself Sufi Abdul Hamid, and when he opened his mosque, he expanded his name to His Holiness Bishop Amiru Al-Mu-Minin Sufi A. Hamid. His press man claimed that he had been born in Egypt beneath the shadow of a pyramid. In reality he had been born Eugene Brown in Lowell, Massachusetts and in Chicago had briefly claimed to be Bishop Conshankin, a Buddhist cleric. Like the Nation of Islam, which was finding its feet at around the same time, his theology was a hodgepodge of Islam and anything else he picked up along the way.

It is unknown what connection Sufi Abdul Hamid had to the burgeoning Nation of Islam, which took the same mix of racism, anti-semitism, black nationalism and Islam and became a major movement, but in the year before he moved to Harlem, Nation of Islam founder Fard Muhammad disappeared, and his successor Elijah Muhammad moved to Chicago after conflicts with the state government and rival NOI leaders. Hamid was probably never part of the Nation of Islam, but he had almost certainly seen it in action and his New York operation was guided by similar methods.

The year was 1932. In Germany, the actual Hitler was running for president. In New York City, Mayor Jimmy Walker was still reigning as the corrupt but entertaining figurehead of Tammany Hall’s Democratic party apparatus, but in a few months the Seabury Commission’s investigation into the city’s horrifyingly corrupt justice system would send the Tin Pan Alley singing mayor fleeing off to Europe along with his showgirl wife.

The Great Depression had hit New York’s prosperous commercial sector like a sledgehammer. The city that never slept had not gone quiet, but it had slowed down. [……]

The time was ripe for a messiah or a violent explosion. And Sufi Abdul Hamid offered them both.

Hamid was not the only one working the streets of Harlem. The Young Communist League and the Young Liberators had been there first looking for cannon fodder for the revolution. The Japanese were dreaming of a black army that would serve as their fifth column in the conquest of the United States. Both were to be disappointed. The Black Communist, once commonplace among Harlem intellectuals, would become an endangered species beginning with the Hitler-Stalin pact and ending with the liberal takeover of civil rights. But for now black intellectuals would visit Japan and even endorse its brutal invasion of China.

Imperial Japan’s simultaneous cultivation of Muslims in order to subvert the British Empire, also led to ties between Japanese officials and the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad. The Moorish Science Temple, a more explicit fusion of Islam, Asiatic exoticism and Black Nationalism, another pseudo-Islamic cult operating out of Chicago. would eventually be investigated by the FBI for ties to Japan. These days, its members are more likely to be investigated for squatting empty mansions on the grounds that they are descendants of the ancient Moabites of Africa and represent a sovereign nation.

[……]

Sufi Abdul Hamid was not limited to Japanese money. He had something better. For all his theatrics, under the slick mustache, the gold lined cape and gleaming dagger, beat the heart of a community organizer.

What Hamid came up with was a combination labor union, employment agency, protection racket, Islamic cult and protest movement. With black unemployment in Harlem running as high as 50 percent, he offered to find jobs for black men who paid him a dollar. And to make sure they got hired, his men picketed businesses demanding that they be put on the payroll. Businesses which didn’t have a proper proportion of black employees were accused of racism and exploitation. Businesses which did were harassed anyway until they fired their black employees and hired Hamid’s men instead.

Hamid’s 125th street stepladder harangues intimidated Jewish store owners and customers, and many black customers as well. Whenever he succeeded, he picked up more recruits who might not believe in his religious message, but liked the idea of getting a job. Businesses that paid up didn’t have to worry that the cape wearing hatemonger would show up in front of their store screaming violent threats.

Hamid’s following grew. As did his bank account.

By 1938, Hamid had his own private plane and a white secretary. His union had gone through many names, from the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance to the Afro-American Federation of Labor. Adam Clayton Powell briefly joined forces with Sufi Abdul Hamid in labor protests and store boycotts, but Hamid was too power hungry to work with anyone for long.

Black Hitler’s rhetoric moved beyond anti-white and anti-Jewish racism to targeting light skinned blacks. Violent clashes with rival black unions led to Hamid’s arrest for stabbing Hammie Snipes, a former follower of Marcus Garvey turned Communist labor union organizer. [……] But before that the Black Hitler would play a role in Harlem’s first race riot.

The Harlem riot of 1935 had many of the characteristics of what would become the typical race riot. False information about police brutality circulated by radicals looking to stir up a mob. Looting misrepresented as a civil rights protest. And a swelling undercurrent of bigotry portrayed as outrage. As Congresswoman Maxine Waters would call the LA riots, “a revolution” and a “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice”; Nannie H. Burroughs compared the Harlem riot to the Boston Tea Party and claimed that it was the duty of the oppressed to revolt.

The tactic was an old one, unleash violence and then claim to be the only ones who could bottle it up. Hamid had begun by intimidating storeowners with the threat of racial violence, but the race riot of 1935 would intimidate the entire neighborhood and eventually the entire city. [……]

A race riot before 1935 had been an unusual phenomenon in Harlem. After 1935, it became far less so. Next year when Joe Louis lost his first fight against Max Schmeling, Harlem rioters attacked white men in the street and dropped bricks from buildings on passing cars.

The 1935 riot would destroy as many black businesses as white ones. But the Communists who had played a major role in organizing the riot, did not want to see black men reach the middle class, and Sufi Abdul Hamid wanted to increase the scope of his protection racket. The courts had taken a dim view of his labor organizing tactics, but a race riot allowed stores to be hit up in a whole new way.

The riots and arsons went on for three days. Two hundred stores were destroyed and many more were looted. Fires were set to cries of “Let it burn”. Entire businesses were wiped out. Some never recovered. The damage to Harlem’s business district was estimated at one million dollars. Bodies went to hospitals and morgues.

In what would also become a commonplace feature of race riots, afterward, in a bid to gain mainstream political influence, the Black Hitler debuted a more moderate image.

In an interview with The Nation magazine, he disavowed bigotry and claimed to be a champion of the underprivileged. Liberal newspapers and magazines were all too eager to embrace the myth that the riot was caused by oppression rather than radical manipulation. [……] While some Jewish newspapers called the attacks a ‘Pogrom’, the socialist Forward insisted on whitewashing the attacks as a protest against the authorities.

The judicial crackdown on Hamid’s labor extortion racket refocused his attention on his mosque, the Universal Holy Temple of Tranquility, where he dubbed himself a Bishop. His nickname migrated from the Black Hitler to the Black Mufti. He married Queenie St. Clair, who ran Harlem’s numbers racket, but their marriage ended badly when Queenie shot him, but failed to kill him. Hamid married again and bought a private plane, an obscene luxury at a time when many of those he claimed to help didn’t have enough to eat. But Hamid frugally kept it low on gas. The plane ran out of fuel over Long Island and crashed. Hamid died, survived by his white secretary who suffered only a broken elbow.

His new wife, a candle shop owner and fortune teller named Dorothy Hamid, who styled herself Madame Fu Futtam, and improbably claimed to be Asian, attempted to keep Hamid’s mosque going with visits that he reportedly made to her nightly from beyond the grave. Her prediction that Hamid would return from the grave in sixty days did not come true.

Not long after the mosque became a dance hall featuring a one legged dancer. Today the site at 103 Morningside Avenue is the home of St. Luke’s Baptist Church.

But though Sufi Abdul Hamid is mostly forgotten today, his legacy lives on.

60 years later, back on 125th street where the Black Hitler had delivered his stepladder harangues, the smashed windows and burning stores would make a comeback.

In the winter of 1995,Al Sharpton and his National Action Network went to Harlem to lead a protest against another Jewish store, Freddie’s Fashion Mart. Sharpton denounced Freddie’s owner as a “White Interloper” in Harlem, protesters mimed tossing matches into the store, and one of them threatened to “Burn the Jew Store Down”.

Finally one of the protesters pulled out a gun, ordered the black customers to leave and set the store on fire. Seven of the store’s mostly Hispanic employees died in the blaze.

[……] When Obama visited Sharpton to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his National Action Network, he was commemorating not just the 20th anniversary of the Crown Heights Pogrom, but an organization which had ominous similarities to Hamid’s own.

The Freddie’s protests had been led by Morris Powell who ran the National Action Network’s Buy Black Committee, which echoed Hamid’s Don’t Buy campaign. Powell’s tactic of standing outside and screaming hatefilled slurs at passerby would have been entirely familiar to Hamid. “Keep going right on past Freddy’s, he’s one of the greedy Jew bastards killing our people. Don’t give the Jew a dime.”Powell’s record goes back to 1984 when he broke the head of a Korean woman during one of his pickets. [……]

Sharpton too had plenty in common with the Black Hitler. Like Hamid, Sharpton started out with a flamboyant personality, playing on bigotry while terrorizing storeowners and entire communities, fueling the perception that he was the man who could unleash or tamp down racial violence, and then toned down his rhetoric in exchange for political influence. Hamid never lived long enough to see the president come down to pay homage to him, but Al Sharpton did.

The Black Hitler demonstrated that racial violence is profitable. Today Hamid is remembered as a pioneering union organizer. And Sharpton has been to the White House more often than any black leader. Sharpton’s gold medallion and Hamid’s turban and cape were showpieces. Their bigoted rhetoric and mob pickets a way of playing on violent populism. Self-interested protests whose goal is to boost the profile of a leader and the bank accounts of his organization have become the bread and butter of more mainstream leaders like Jesse Jackson. Their occasional outbursts of bigotry are forgiven for the power, protection and influence that they bring to the table.

Even after the fire, Powell returned to Freddie’s screaming, “Freddie Ain’t Dead Yet”. The Black Hitler ain’t dead yet either. Not until his tactics are disavowed for good.

As someone wrote “these people are not Jews, they are Marxists whose ancestors happened to be Jewish”. They will be as forgotten as all the other “Jews:” who worked to destroy the Jewish State.

by Daniel Greenfield

Alan Alda’s wife signed a letter denouncing the newly elected left-wing mayor of New York for doing AIPAC’s bidding. The Sandinista supporter had been accused of many things until then, but being an Israeli stooge wasn’t one of them. Signing the letter, along with the spouse of that guy from MASH, were Martha Weinman Lear, the wife of the cousin of liberal producer Norman Lear, Eve Ensler of the Vagina Monologues and diet guru Jane Hirschmann author of Overcoming Overeating who took a break from obsessing over food to sail on a Jihad cruise to Gaza.

Signing on to the attack on Bill de Blasio for being a dirty Zionist were such faded celebrities of the literary left as Erica Jong, who hasn’t written a single book that anyone can name in the forty years since Fear of Flying first came out and Gloria Steinem, who peaked around that same time.

These familiar names of the Manhattan cocktail party circuit who grind their teeth every time they hear Netanyahu’s name, give way to the professional activists, the board members of the toxic American Jewish World Service, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Dorot, the Rabbis for Gaza and Rabbis for Obama and the men and women like Peter Beinart of Open Zion and Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace who have built their lives around the war on Israel as much as any Islamic Jihadist tinkering with a Kassam rocket in Gaza.

Joining them was Kathleen Peratis who, according to her Nation bio is a “longtime peace activist” who repeatedly calls for boycotting Israel despite traveling there “at least twice a year for the past twenty years.” It’s unclear how she combined the two, perhaps she made sure not to buy anything from Jews while she was in Israel.

Their names are equally familiar to a smaller circle of those who fight for and against Israel and their signatures are as predictable as snowstorms in winter.

The radical clergy sign on; Rachel Brown Cowan, a Unitarian who married a Jewish writer for the Village Voice, added “Rabbi” to her name and has been attacking the Jewish State non-stop after her husband’s death, Rolando Matalon, who has yet to find a Latin American Marxist group he wouldn’t embrace, Ellen Lippmann, a BDS supporter and Sharon Kleinbaum, a lesbian supporter of the Fast for Gaza that aids and abets the not particularly pro-lesbian Hamas.

Reading these names feels like reviewing the membership of a small familiar club. Everyone knows everyone else and everyone in the club hates Israel.

Between Erica Jong and Alice Kessler-Harris (the biographer of Anti-Israel Communist playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Kessler described as having a “streak of Jewish anti-Semitism”) is Peter A. Joseph who pays for this whole dance, funding everything from Peter Beinart’s Open Zion to the Manhattan JCC whose anti-Israel turn has led to a pitched battle among members.

[……]

The Israel Policy Forum put out a letter in support of Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, despite his ties to the Iran Lobby, signed by Peter A. Joseph, hedge fund manager Neil Barsky, Marcia Riklis, the daughter of corporate raider Meshulam Riklis (not by his second wife Pia Zadora), Jack C. Bendheim, the president of a company that once dumped toxic waste in a Connecticut town, and Risa A. Levine, apparently a real estate lawyer from New York.

[……..]

Hating Israel has become a small petty club for the wealthy left and the Israel Policy Forum allows assorted obscure figures to assert their status by denouncing things or demanding things under the banner of an organization whose only asset is the wealth of a few private equity backers.

The Jewish Anti-Israel left likes to pretend that it’s a grassroots movement whose voice is being squelched by some nebulous Jewish establishment when in reality it is an unelected establishment using its wealth and lingering fame to shout over the majority of American Jews who support Israel.

These sons, daughters, stepdaughters, wives and nieces of famous people, fading Feminist writers, Wall Street millionaires trying to buy social relevance, hippie social scientists who hit it big with books about food, sex or childrearing, radical rabbis holding forth to congregations who believe in religion as little as their preachers, are a phantom establishment, community leaders without a community except their own mutual approbation.

The Jewish Anti-Israel left is a phantom establishment of family foundations that direct money to networks of organizations that use the money to hire personnel and send out press releases to their own former staffers working for newspapers who then write about them maintaining the illusion of churning activity, when in reality all that is happening is that money is being moved around.

Anti-Israel Wall Street figures hire Anti-Israel activists to denounce the Jewish establishment for not paying enough attention to them. Family foundations run by privileged leftists send American activists to Israel to set up front groups to protest against something or other. They hold dinners where the nieces and nephews, the boycotters and the faded stars of the left listen to the activists that they pay tell them that any day now, American Jews will finally come around to their point of view.

[…….]
Every few weeks the Israel Policy Forum churns out another letter headlined “Prominent Jews Urge Someone or Other To Do Something” signed by the guy who made a Koch documentary, Pia Zadora’s stepdaughter, a hedge funder, another hedge funder, the guy whose company left drums of toxic waste in Connecticut, the Rabbi who loves the Sandinistas even more than Bill de Blasio and a retired Democratic congressman who attends the same cocktail parties.

The phantom establishment floats on a bubble of its own manufactured prominence. Its letter signers are important because they fund organizations that put out letters which they then sign. These antics are not limited to the Israel Policy Forum or even the United States.

A year after British comedian Stephen Fry appeared on a genealogy television show to trace his mother’s Jewish roots, he signed on to a letter by British Jews, a group that he had never considered himself a member of, declaring its “independence” from the British Jewish establishment. The list included the expected collection of fading feminist authors, Marxist playwrights, historians and philosophers, as well as radical sociologists, pop psychologists and professional activists.

The “coming out party” of Independent Jewish Voices consisted of non-practicing Marxist Jews who were notorious for hating Israel, the UK, industry, facts, mirrors and human civilization announcing that loudly in a letter that was covered by their media friends.

There is a long history of such letters going back to the founding of Israel, the names of forgotten self-proclaimed leaders mixing with a few more notorious figures whose unfortunate legacy has survived into this time. None of these letters however have counted as much as a bullet in the rifle of an Israeli soldier standing watch in the night.

American Jews who worry over these letters from the phantom establishment of the cocktail party ought to look back and see how futile the rantings of I.F. Stone, New Dealer Joseph Proskauer, the rabid Elmer Berger and FDR speechwriter Samuel Rosenman proved to be.

Before J Street or the Israel Policy Forum, there was Jewish Alternatives to Zionism headed by “Rabbi” Elmer Berger who had claimed that the Communist revolution in the Soviet Union meant that Jews no longer needed “Palestine”.

Does anyone remember Lewis Affelder or Mr. and Mrs. Noel A. Buckner whose names appeared as sponsors on Jewish Alternatives to Zionism’s stationary? How many remember Mary Louise `Wheezie’ Gutman who collected English ceramics and owned a distillery? The wind of history has blown past their graves. Their names are smeared ink on yellowed paper while children play in the streets of Jerusalem.

The phantom establishment is rootless; it has no links to a people or to a religion. Its aims are destructive and like all destructive forces, it carries its own futility with it.

American Jews should contend with them, but should not be too impressed by them. Their kind has been at it for generations and, despite all the venom and fury, the boycotts and screeds, have made less of an impression on Israel than a single Jewish family in the hills of Shomron.

The phantom establishment is money and words. There is no blood in its veins or heart in its chest. It does not go on the way that the Jewish people do because it is not of them, only against them. When its anger is spent and its letters are signed, the children will play on in the streets and roads, the hills and fields of Israel, neither knowing nor caring that there was once a Jane Hirschmann, a Mrs. Noel A. Buckner, a Rachel Brown Cowan or a Rebecca Vilkomerson that sought to do them harm.

Hollywood twists itself into pretzels trying to avoid facing the fact that the physical threat to ordinary citizens of America and Europe does not come from Christian fundamentalists, Serbian nationalists, Communist thugocracies such as Cuba, North Korea or the People’s Republic of China, or greedy capitalists, but the only religion that the Left Coast smiles upon, The Religion of Peace. When they recast the villains of the Tom Clancy movie “The Sum of All Fears” from Arabs to “neo-Nazis” I thought maybe Charles F. Johnson was producing the film. As the Knish points out, these movies do not make money, but as I have always maintained that is not what the industry is interested in (although of course they want to make money), they make these films in order to feel good about themselves, to get awards from each other, and to tap into the anti-American film market overseas.

by Daniel Greenfield

In real life, terrorists are almost always Muslim. In the movie theater, they are anything but. America’s fictional secret agents, covert operatives and rogue cops who play by their own rules have spent more time battling Serbian terrorists than Muslim terrorists.

Before September 11, 24′s Jack Bauer was fighting the international menace of Serbian terrorism. Serbian terrorists also showed up in 1999′s Diplomatic Siege when their “Serbian Liberation Front” took over a US embassy and in 1997′s The Peacemaker with George Clooney rushing to stop a Serb from detonating a nuke in New York City.

The United States has remained unscathed by Serbian terrorism, though the same can’t be said for Peter Weller, the star of Diplomatic Siege, and Mimi Leder, the director of The Peacemaker, but not by Muslim terrorist attacks. Despite September 11, the Fort Hood Massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings, Hollywood has resolutely kept its eye on the real threat.

Serbian terrorism.

This weekend, Ride Along, which features Ice “F___ the Police” Cube playing a cop, knocked Lone Survivor out of the top spot at the box office, and once again takes on the terrible threat of… Serbian terrorism.

When the Serbs aren’t available, the Russians have to step in. The Russians are more likely to appear as villains after the fall of the Soviet Union than during the Communist era. It’s as if the end of Soviet Communism finally set Hollywood free to join in the fun of Boris and Natasha villains without any of the guilt about red-baiting.

When Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit featured a terrorist cell in Dearborn, even though Muslims dominate the area, the villains were shown operating out of a Russian Orthodox church and getting their cues from a priest reading the bible while the terrorists cried out, “Slava Bogu” or “Praise God.”

It would have been unrealistic to show them praising Allah instead.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is the latest attempt at making a Tom Clancy movie without the Tom Clancy part. Sum of All Fears, one of the first movies about terrorism to come out after September 11, jettisoned Clancy’s Muslim villains.

Its writer Dan Pyne dismissed Islamic terrorism as a “cliche”; even though a plot can’t be a cliche when it never appears in movies, only in real life. Pyne however found a more realistic villain. “I think, there was some neo-nationalist activity in Holland, and there was stuff going on in Spain and in Italy. So it seemed like a logical and lasting idea that would be universal.”

Nothing is more universal than the threat of neo-nationalists in Holland. Dutch neo-nationalism is an enduring world menace that everyone can relate to.

The neo-nationalists of the Netherlands that Pyne had discovered were probably Pim Fortuyn’s party. Fortuyn was a Sociology professor who favored drug legalization, gay marriage and less Muslim immigration. The neo-nationalist threat of the Netherlands did not prove lasting when around the time that Sum of All Fears was playing in theaters; Fortuyn was murdered by a leftist who, like Pyne, worried about the plight of the Muslims.

In an even bigger cliche, Theo van Gogh, who had just finished directing May 6th, a movie about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim immigrant from Morocco who told the victim’s mother that he could have no empathy for her because she was a non-Muslim.

It was the sort of ridiculous cliche that Dan Pyne would never have put into a script.

Instead Dan Pyne went on to write a remake of the Manchurian Candidate in which Communist China was replaced by the “Manchurian Corporation”. He’s currently working on a movie featuring a Syrian rescue worker who gets mistaken for a terrorist while trying to save lives during Hurricane Katrina.

It’s a cliche, but it’s the kind of cliche that Hollywood likes.

If a movie is made about September 11 a decade from, now, the villains will probably be Serbian nationalists. It would be a cliche to have 19 Muslim hijackers murder 3,000 people. And then the camera will linger meaningfully on a Muslim rescuer wrongly taken into custody by a bigoted NYPD cop who is overlooking the real Serbian/Dutch neo-nationalist corporate villains.

The Serbians, Russians and Netherlands neo-nationalists are only the understudies who get called in when the usual villains, right-wing extremists who want to false flag America into a war with the Muslims, are on vacation.

After 24 got done with the Serbian terror threat, it defaulted to the real threat of government warmongers trying to fake a Muslim terror threat. After 9/11, 24′s second season’s story was about an evil government conspiracy to fake a Muslim terrorist attack. […..]

When the Serbs went on strike last year, White House Down brought in a villainous Speaker of the House with a Jewish last name to assassinate a black president in order to sabotage his treaty with Iran. The movie lost so much money that Sony blamed its quarterly $197 million loss on it.

Serbian terrorism had struck again.

When a straightforward presentation flops, Hollywood finds ways of embedding the same old message into more fantastic fare. Last summer, Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness and the Lone Ranger all had minor variations of the same story about false flag attacks that were orchestrated by governments or powerful interests connected to them. […..]

Nowhere in all these tales of evil corporations and governments is there a movie about an entertainment industry so intertwined with government that it not only helped pick the country’s current leader, but it constantly releases propaganda films attempting to revise reality according to his worldview. That would be a cliché; much like the idea of that industry filming false flag movies depicting the favorite villains of the Clinton Administration carrying out ridiculously implausible acts of terror to retroactively justify its focus on the Serbs instead of Al Qaeda.

Hollywood stands as firmly against depicting Muslim terrorism as Hollywood Communists after the Hitler-Stalin pact did against anti-Nazi films. If they had been positioned further up the ladder back then, instead of mainly being relegated to writing scripts, we would no doubt have a catalog of movies featuring Yankee warmongers plotting to stage fake Nazi attacks on America.

Hollywood’s ideological hostility to reality however has not proven to be very profitable.

The Peacemaker, a movie written and co-produced by the Cockburns, whose politics are slightly to the left of Stalin, was the inaugural feature from the failed Spielberg-Geffen-Katzenberg Dreamworks studio and disappointed critics and audiences. […..]

Sum of All Fears, the movie inspired by the Netherlands neo-nationalist threat, was the weakest performer of the Tom Clancy movies when accounting for ticket price inflation and full budget. And it still had a much better opening weekend than Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.

Failure however won’t stop Hollywood from alerting the nation to the terrorist threat lurking in Orthodox Churches or the Dutch neo-nationalists trying to nuke our cities. Hollywood’s handpicked leaders were the ones who made the country vulnerable to Islamic terrorism and their industry has gone on covering up for them with movies in which the villains can be anyone and everyone except the real killers.

Can you imagine any time between 1937 and 1945 a Japanese flag flying over any site in America? An Islamic flag in front of the World Trade Center in 1997 (four years after Muslims tried to bring down the WTC down) presaged the Ramadan dinners, the “Islam is a religion of peace” pablum that is a part of the staple of American political culture. The sycophancy of the American presidency and the political elites regarding Islam is nauseating. I do recall Mohammad T. Mehdi from the 1970’s and 80’sm he was a loudmouthed rabble rouser.

by Daniel Greenfield

“A flag bearing a crescent and star flies from a flagpole in front of the World Trade Center, next to a Christmas tree and a menorah.”—New York Times, 1997

In 1997, Mohammed T. Mehdi, the head of the Arab-American Committee and the National Council on Islamic Affairs, lobbied to have a crescent and star put up at the World Trade Center during the holiday season. His wish was granted, despite the fact that he had been an adviser to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman also known as the Blind Sheikh.

In the name of diversity and political correctness, an adviser to the religious leader behind the World Trade Center bombing, was allowed to plant an Islamic symbol of conquest in the very place that had been bombed.

Long before the Ground Zero Mosque was even a twinkle in the eye of a violent ex-waiter and aslumlord Imam, the World Trade Center allowed Mohammed T. Mehdi to bully it into flying the symbol of Islam.

By 1997, Mohammed T. Mehdi had become an unambiguously ugly public figure. He had been fired by Mayor Dinkins in 1992 for anti-Semitic remarks. The year before he had proclaimed that, “Millions of Arabs believe Saddam stands tall having defied Western colonialism”.

In 1995, the US Attorney’s Office in New York had listed Mehdi as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of Sheikh Rahman. Mehdi had already published a book titled “Kennedy and Sirhan: Why?”, which contended that Robert Kennedy’s assassin had been acting in self-defense.

Because of Mehdi’s role in actively working on behalf of the Sheikh behind the wave of terrorism that included the original attack on the World Trade Center, turning down his request should have been a no-brainer. Instead in the winter of 1997 there was an Islamic star and crescent at the World Trade Center. And another one at the park in front of the White House.

Four years before the September 11 attacks; both targets had already been marked.

The previous year had marked the first annual Ramadan dinner at the State Department, integrating the Islamic celebration into the Clinton Administration’s schedule of events. Bill Clinton had not visited the World Trade Center after the bombing, but he did make time for Ramadan.

A month after 9/11, Bush went Clinton one better when he became the first president to host a Ramadan dinner at the White House. Many of the Muslim ambassadors at the event were representing countries that helped finance Al Qaeda. Little more than a month after September 11, the President of the United States sat down to break bread with the money men behind the attacks.

The Star and Crescent flying at the World Trade Center did not prevent it from being targeted in a second greater attack four years later. Nor did the Ramadan dinners keep the plane headed for the White House at bay. It took the self-sacrifice of its American passengers to do that. Instead every gesture of appeasement only seemed to make it worse.

[…..]

No one who understood what had happened at the World Trade Center in 1993, would have permitted a banner associated with its attackers to be flown there. But while the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, let Mehdi have his way with the World Trade Center, other Muslims were working to carry out Sheikh Abdel-Rahman’s agenda for a war on America and the free world.

[……]

While the Star and Crescent was blowing in the cold December wind coming off the Hudson River, an even colder wind was blowing out of Hamburg, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. A year earlier Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had come up with the idea and presented it to Osama bin Laden. A year later the operation began to move forward.

While Secretary of State Albright was holding her Ramadan dinners, other Ramadan dinners were being held out of sight at which more substantive events were being discussed.

While the US was busy bombing Yugoslavian civilians in order to create a separatist Muslim state for KLA terrorists; Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were recruiting the first of the 9/11 hijackers. While the United States tried to appease Muslims, Muslims plotted to murder Americans.

In 1997, the New York Daily News wrote an upbeat story about Mehdi’s Star and Crescent, which envisioned Islam blending merrily into the holiday season.

New York may seem a little brighter this holiday season as the glowing Muslim crescent and star symbol nudges its way onto a seasonal landscape of Christmas trees, menorahs and Kwanzaa candles.

Four years later, cheery folks yelling “Allahu Akbar” had filled downtown Manhattan with ashen snow and brightened it with the flames of the burning towers of the World Trade Center.

The 9/11 hijackers left behind notes which said among other things, “Shout, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers”.

If there were any Santas on those planes, they were certainly drowned out by the cries of “Allah Akbar”. And if that didn’t drown them out, having their throats being slit by the cheery folks with box cutters surely did.

[…….]

“It would be like a gift for somebody,” a police officer said, who was spending his holiday searching through the debris. A gift for the infidels from Islam.

While Muslims were stuffing their faces in November of 2001, Americans were mourning their dead. While Abdul, Mohammed and Raisa were picking through their lamb stew, Americans were picking up the pieces of their loved ones. But it was they who were told to be sensitive to Muslim concerns.

From Pakistan, Musharraf urged the US to suspend bombing his Taliban allies during Ramadan. In the name of sensitivity. New York City schools were making arrangements for Muslim prayers out of “heightened sensitivity to Muslim concerns after the Sept. 11 attack”. Instead of Americans being on the receiving end of “heightened sensitivity”, the ideology that had conspired to murder them was.

On the 9th anniversary of 9/11, Islam had another gift for New Yorkers. Having bought up a building damaged in their own attack, they plotted to set up a grand mosque near Ground Zero. Another gift to New Yorkers from the religion that kept on giving. Another Crescent and Star.

The same people who did not learn the lesson in 1997, and allowed the Crescent and Star to fly at the World Trade Center, were eager to let the Ground Zero Mosque go forward in the name of tolerance. But despite the Crescent and Star, appeasement proved to be no defense.

3,000 died on 9/11 because American leaders preferred to appease, rather than confront. And we are still busy appeasing, like never before.

As one reads the Knish, one realizes that Hillary Cinton is nearly as vapid as Barack Obama. had she not married Bill she would have been an unspectacular but steadily employed lawyer and nobody would ever have herd of her. She owes every thing to her husband. Someone recently said that the best thing that happened to Hillary was that HillaryCare never went through otherwise there would be no talk about President Hillary Clinton.

by Daniel Greenfield

Hardly a week goes by without Hillary Clinton receiving another award.

Last month she was named a “Global Champion” by the International Medical Corps at a gala Beverly Hills event crowded with celebrities, received the American Patriot Award at the National Defense University Foundation in the Ronald Reagan Building and the Hermandad Award from the Mexican American Leadership Initiative.

Considering that Hillary Clinton is as much of an American patriot as is she is a Mexican-American leader… both awards seem equally deserved.

Hillary was honored by Malaria No More for taking the controversial position of being against malaria and by the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice for supporting internet freedom. Because nothing says a deep commitment to internet freedom like sending a man to jail for a year over a YouTube video that offended Muslims.

The President of Georgia (the one in the Caucasus) honored her with the Order of the Golden Fleece. That’s considered a high honor in Georgia, but back in the United States it just reminds everyone of Whitewater and the Rose Law Firm.

[…..]

The American Bar Association had already given Hillary its highest honor for “her immense accomplishments as a lawyer”. The National Constitution Center awarded her the Liberty Medal (an honor she shares with such Constitutional scholars as Bono, Hamid Karzai and her husband) and Elton John gave her an award for fighting AIDS declaring himself “honoured to honour her”.

(If you’re keeping track, Hillary has come out against malaria, epilepsy and AIDS. No word on her position on shingles—but reportedly she’s against it.)

At this rate, if a bunch of elderly left-wing Norwegians toss her the Nobel Peace Prize early on, the way they did to Obama, it will barely rate mention among all the other glittering trophies that have been bestowed on a woman whose only actual accomplishment was being married to a crooked governor with good political instincts and sharp elbows.

Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments as a lawyer, like her accomplishments as a senator and a secretary of state, don’t actually exist. The more awards Hillary gets, the fewer people will wonder about her qualifications. Like the fake doctor with 200 equally fake diplomas on the wall; the award blitz is a pathetic case of overcompensation. […….]

It’s been a while since there was an inevitable candidate in American politics four years before an actual presidential election. It’s been even longer since there was a candidate so barren of actual accomplishments and so devoid of anything resembling content.

Hillary traipses around the country and the world picking up awards and delivering speeches for six figures a pop; but the only words that come out of her mouth are boring cliches.

Receiving an AIDS award from Elton John’s foundation, she announced insightfully, “We still have a long way to go.” Strangely enough this is what people who have never had AIDS or treated AIDS have been saying while receiving AIDS awards since the disease first became a celebrity cause.

At Oceana, Hillary declared, “More and more people appreciate what oceans mean to them.” At the University of Buffalo, she expressed the hope that we could “move away from the slash and burn politics, the name calling, the excessive partisanship” and at the Women of the World summit declared that the United States had “come so far, but there is still work to be done.”

[……]

The more you listen to Hillary, the more you realize that she doesn’t have ideas, she has cliches. String together a bunch of cliches and you have a Hillary speech. String together a bunch of Hillary speeches and you have a candidacy that is as empty as it is inevitable. Hillary isn’t even Chauncey Gardiner. Her cliches lack even accidental poetry. Instead they’re as empty as she is.

What does Hillary stand for? A casual observer would be forgiven for assuming that she stands for nothing. After eight years in the senate, the only thing about her time there that anyone bothers to mention is her vote on the Iraq War. That’s because there isn’t anything to mention.

If Hillary had not accidentally taken what would become a controversial position, while trying to cast a safe vote, all that anyone would remember about her time in the Senate is that she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame for “opening new pathways for women in leadership”.

That was quite an accomplishment considering that she was the 32nd female senator.

[…….]

But Hillary is always being honored as a revolutionary leader for just showing up. If she has something positive to say about the oceans, teaching little girls or fighting AIDS; there’s an award in it for her. If Hillary daringly says that reading is good today; tomorrow she wins a Pulitzer. That’s how low the Hillary bar has been set.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton traveled a lot. The National Constitution Center honored her because, in their words, “she traveled to more countries than any other Secretary of State”. Also because she “used social media to engage citizens”. It certainly sounds better than honoring her for abusing the State Department to prep for a presidential run with a non-stop world tour while neglecting desperate pleas for help from the Benghazi mission which had been under siege for months.

And that’s the best that can be said about a term that wrapped up with that election shakedown that had been her endgame all along, the murder of four Americans and Hillary pounding the table and demanding to know what difference it made. As every foundation, think-tank, university, charity and non-profit that has rushed to cover her in golden medals, orders and awards will tell you… none at all.

But despite the awards, there is very little enthusiasm even among Democrats for President Hillary. Jeffrey Katzenberg, Hollywood’s leading liberal, came out for her saying, “I think she’s the best candidate currently available for either party.” Considering that Hillary is really the only Democrat semi-officially running now, not counting Joe Biden, that’s damning with faint praise.

There’s a reason that liberals are fantasizing about an Elizabeth Warren run. Warren is even less charismatic, more off-putting and more cliche-prone than Hillary, but you do know what she stands for. “Socialism today, Socialism tomorrow, Socialism forever.” Hillary Clinton stands for the same thing; but she has spent decades trying to be discreet about it.

Instead of letting her “You didn’t build that” freak flag fly in a safe blue state like Warren did, Hillary Clinton has carefully crafted a completely safe image. That was what undid her candidacy in 2008. Given a choice between a candidate who stood for a whole range of things and one who stood for being president; they chose Obama. Eight years later; no one still has any idea what she stands for.

Hillary’s calculated vacuousness smacks of paranoia. At a time when Democrats want some red meat, she tries to be less partisan than Obama. At all her award ceremonies, she speaks in cliches and stays away from anything that anyone could find controversial or memorable. There’s no way that she can offend anyone if she spends all her time emitting contentless cliches.

Beneath the bland rhetoric is a paranoid control freak obsessed with controlling and shaping every aspect of her image. Her partner in this endeavor is Media Matters’ David Brock; a man whose legendary paranoia rivals her own, who had been hospitalized for a mental breakdown after believing that people were trying to kill him and who allegedly used an illegally armed security team to protect him from “right-wing assassins”.

Together Brock and Clinton have already shut down a number of friendly film and television projects about Hillary while Brock peddles “The Benghazi Hoax”; a book that smacks of Hillary Clinton’s old obsession with a vast right-wing conspiracy. A Hillary biopic in which the former first lady is played by an actress capable of conveying actual human emotion would do her image a lot more good than Brock’s paranoid rantings. But it would appear that Brock’s paranoid mindset mirrors her own.

Hillary Clinton has played the long game, moving slowly from one position to another, with her eyes on the White House. But in her calculating chess game, she has neglected the details of the present. Hillary lost in 2008 because she was too busy building an inevitable candidacy to give people an actual reason to vote for her. And now she’s making the same mistake all over again.

It’s easy to be the inevitable candidate when no one is actually running against you. The hypothetical inevitable candidate is rarely someone that people actually want to vote for. Like Mitt Romney, they seem like the sort of man or woman who is probably going to win because everyone says so. When the race heats up, the inevitable candidate collapses and is left behind.

America hasn’t had inevitable presidents in a while. The men who have actually managed to score two terms were absurdly unlikely candidates with obvious flaws whose very prospects were met with ridicule. There was nothing inevitable about Ronald Reagan, a former actor, Bill Clinton, a sleazy draft dodger with infidelity issues, George W. Bush, the son of a one-term president prone to mispronounce important words, and Barack Obama, a political amateur and left-wing radical who defended his racist pastor after the latter was caught screaming “God Damn America” after 9/11.

Hillary Clinton’s inevitable status is her weakness. Inevitable candidates don’t win elections. Just ask John McCain, an American hero and liberal Republican, and Mitt Romney, a man who was born to play the president on television. Or ask Michael Dukakis, the architect of the Massachusetts Miracle, or John Kerry, a man who was not only born to play the president, but who could run on his Vietnam service during wartime.

There will come a time when the awards will stop, when the empty quotes about how she is running because she cares about girls will run out and when she will actually have to give real answers to difficult questions. And that isn’t Hillary’s strong suit. […….]

As a debater, Hillary is rigidly unimaginative. As a politician, she’s vacant. And her charisma doesn’t exist. The only way that she can get through her own party’s primaries and a national election is by scaring away every potential rival by being the inevitable candidate. And that is what the endless Hillary award season is really about.

Hillary Clinton’s awards parade isn’t meant to impress the voters; but to scare away any opponents who might think that they can do to her in 2016 what Obama did to her in 2008. At galas and dinners, she dons an armor made out of awards, prizes and trophies to manufacture the consensus that she is an accomplished everything and that this will be her election because her victory is inevitable.

But Hillary doesn’t really believe that she is the inevitable candidate. If she believed that, she would be less paranoid and controlling… and more capable of relaxing and being herself; whoever that might be. A Hillary with self-confidence wouldn’t need David Brock whispering in her ear and would be able to cut loose problematic figures like Huma Abedin and Sidney Blumenthal whose presence is already harming her premature campaign.

Hillary is obsessed with winning and certain that she will lose. Everything she has done throughout the years was calculated to make defeat as unlikely as possible… including taking the position of Secretary of State while doing as little as possible in that role. Instead of inspiring people, she has built up a bulletproof resume while taking as few risks as possible. And that insecurity may be her undoing.

For 13 years, Hillary has done little except abuse public office to map out her future presidential run. By the time the election actually takes place, she will have spent nearly two decades or a third of her adult life focused on running for president.

At the Benghazi hearings, Hillary famously demanded to know what difference it made. The same can be said of her life.

The Knish points out that the Democrats are likely to turn the ObamaCare fiasco into a revival of HillaryCare as the “perfect” antidote.

by Daniel Greenfield

When Obama decided to turn his campaign into a permanent Super PAC; he was stabbing the Democratic Party in the back. But he was doing it to them, before they did it to him.

Organizing for America gave him an independent source of power and influence at the expense of the Democratic Party. Obama was carelessly draining money and energy out of his own party because whatever common interests he had with a political party, that for all its leftward swing was still too conservative for his taste, were about to be fractured during his second term.

The Democratic Party might have been satisfied if he had retained his 2008 halo in 2015. But that was never going to happen. No matter how much the media slobbers over a politician, the voting public, at least those parts of it that don’t have Hope posters and Obama holograms hanging on their walls, eventually needs a break and someone to blame.

Even vice presidents tend to turn on their own presidents once they begin running for office. George H.W. Bush did it to Reagan and Gore did it to Clinton. It may be hard to remember now in this wave of nostalgia for the 90s when there was actually an economy instead of a shrunken shell of one, but the Democratic Party and the American people had grown sick of Clinton and his scandals.

[……]

Al Gore was just a less successful and even more hypocritical version of Bill Clinton; but the Democratic Party tried to build him an image as a stiff and serious fellow who spent a lot of time deep in thought and might be awkward at parties; but wouldn’t cheat on the entire country. That’s what the Macarena jokes and the grotesque public kiss were about.

With Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party already has an Anti-Obama in waiting

With Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party already has an Anti-Obama in waiting. Hillary claims to be experienced where Obama was inexperienced. Savvier about the practical details of getting things done in Washington D.C. and capable of going the long distance in governance instead of making abrupt leaps of inspiration.

The “Ready for Hillary” image is as phony as Gore’s serious ethical look; but it’s also a shot across Obama’s bow telling him that the Dems were going to throw him under the bus before the next election. With Organizing for America, Obama, whose allegiance has always been to the left, not to anything as reactionary as an American political party, threw them under the bus first.

It’s not a full-fledged civil war. Yet.

Obama’s biggest asset is still the media whose younger and more energetic members lean as leftward as he does. Its older members are more skeptical, but still willing to toe the party line. At the end of his term that will change with the media suddenly hurling unexpectedly bitter criticism his way. That happened to Bill Clinton. It’s likely to happen to Barack Obama.

The media won’t step forward to destroy Obama

The media won’t step forward to destroy Obama. But they will pile on him once it helps Hillary. And he knows it.

There’s a reason that Obama never trusted his biggest fans, locked them up in closets, avoided conferences, carefully selected loyalist lefty pundits for private meeting and even set up his own photographers.

He knew that the time would come when the media would turn on him. When the halo photos would make way for pictures that make him look old and tired. When the same columnists who were talking him up as the great hope of the nation would turn to writing pieces about how he failed and why Hillary is the right woman to take his place.

His media loyalists have worked hard to stem any defections. The vicious attacks on Bob Woodward and Lara Logan are nasty reminders to keep the rest in line. The media lefties who lead them care less about the Democratic Party than they do about the agenda of the left. That is what they have in common with Barack. But the Democratic Party hacks care less about the left than they do about staying in power.

Obama has been politically weakened now and there’s blood in the water

The ObamaCare crisis killed any hope of an enduring truce. Obama has been politically weakened now and there’s blood in the water.

The media hasn’t turned on him. It’s still repeating much of his propaganda about substandard plans and insurance companies, but the polls show that the public isn’t buying it. And the media has not done everything that it could have to shield him from it. There have been too many negative stories that got past the gatekeepers and too many cracks and leaks in the political wall.

ObamaCare has shown that the Prince of Chicago is mortal and that like all politicians, he will go down sooner or later. There will be no revered transition. He will not remain an undying JFK stepping forward into the pages of history. Instead he will be shoved aside to make way for a successor while the men and women who once lionized him shake their heads. In time he will emerge again, the way that Carter and Clinton have, as an elder statesman. But not in 2016.

The split between the Democratic Party and its leftist hijackers was always bound to happen. The interests that aligned them were nakedly political. The left wanted to push its agenda through and the Democrats would have adopted any tactic at all to win. The Democratic Party is ready to cover its tracks and move on. But the left isn’t done pushing through its agenda.

[…….]

There’s not much else that Hillary Clinton can run on in 2016 except health care. Foreign policy interest is at an all time low which takes her time as Secretary of State off the table. That just leaves the economy; an unpredictable topic to build an election campaign around for a race years into the future.

The rebirth of HillaryCare demands the destruction of ObamaCare

The rebirth of HillaryCare demands the destruction of ObamaCare. For Hillary to be able to return to her core issue in 2016, she has to take away Obama’s biggest legislative achievement. And so the problems with ObamaCare may be a nuclear bomb for the Democrats in 2014, but a gift-wrapped package for Hillary in 2016.

If Obama were a team player, he might grit his teeth and take one for the team. But he isn’t. OFA was just the latest demonstration that he owes no allegiance to the Democratic Party and that the awkward marriage of Chicago community organizers, liberal billionaires and the turgid ranks of the jackass party swollen with living fossils like Harry Reid was bound to end sometime.

The big dream of Republican campaign professionals is to force the Democrats into the same circular firing squad that its own people keep collapsing into. That hasn’t happened yet, but there are signs that a stampede may be building.

[…..]

Obama knows all this and doesn’t care. He’s counting on the left to have his back while sacrificing the political fortunes of the Democratic Party for the sake of the progressive agenda. The Democrats might have held on to Congress, but Obama traded their political successes for his own success; weakening the Democratic Party while building his own image and power.

Now the Democratic Party is beginning to bite back. If it’s going to get into shape for 2014 and 2016, it has to claw back donors from his OFA and undermine his political infrastructure. And then it has to turn ObamaCare’s problems into a HillaryCare opportunity. All this is going to mean an ugly political civil war with the left turning on the Democratic Party and the media caught in the middle.

Obama carved up the Democratic Party for political spare parts. Now the Democratic Party is about to return the favor.

The left has never come to grips with the fact that in the words of Jackie “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights… it had to be some silly little Communist”. That is why they need more and more outlandish conspiracies concerning stereotypical right-wingers i.e Cuban exiles, corporate honchos, CIA, John Birchers, etc.

by Daniel Greenfield

Sometimes a conspiracy theory exposes a conspiracy. Sometimes the conspiracy theory is the conspiracy.

JFK assassination plots are the only conspiracy theories to be widely accepted by the general public. The moon landing filmed in a studio, the Lincoln conspiracy or the World Trade Center being blown up by lasers from outer space never gained much credence because they lacked mainstream backing. Conspiracy theories ordinarily remain on the margins. The JFK theories were too important to the liberals who were really running things to allow them to die out.

There are probably more Americans who could tell you the ins and outs of the “magic bullet” than can recite the Bill of Rights from memory. More books have been sold about the Kennedy assassination than about any of the real government abuses taking place today.

The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination brings with it the usual weighty tomes, speculative articles and nostalgic reminiscing about the utopia that might have been. The political messianism of JFK was as doomed as that of any other liberal savior. Unlike Obama, it conveniently ended in a martyrdom which excused a generation of liberal failures.

[…….] Oliver Stone’s JFK was a laborious effort to connect the murder of a liberal icon to the despicable conservative villains that his political martyrdom demanded.

The endless search for the real killers was not done to find them, but to perpetuate the myth. The search could never be complete; the conspiracy theories could provide no closure; though the lynching of Nixon for daring to try and make JFK’s ideas work helped put to rest the ghosts of Camelot for many angry liberals.

[……]

The directions in which the JFK conspiracy theories point reveal what they are trying to hide. John F. Kennedy was not murdered by a miasma of hatred on the right, but on the left. Before liberals became leftists, leftists had a propensity for killing liberals.

And Lee Harvey Oswald was as far to the left as you could go.

There was never really any disagreement about Lee Harvey Oswald’s politics. The media has avoided the issue by characterizing him as a screwball, but Lee Harvey Oswald was a militant Socialist screwball who defected to the USSR and plotted the murders of people he considered “right-wing.”

Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a continuum of left-wing terror in America. The murder of JFK was a bridge between the explosions of violence in the twenties by anarchists and by the Weathermen in the seventies. Oswald was the leading edge of American left-wing violence.

Like so many radicals, Oswald was bored and shiftless. The reality of the Soviet Union with no revolution, just factories to work at, did not appeal to him. Instead he drifted back to America, a weapon in search of a target. The actual murder may have shocked the nation, but it would not be very long before left-wing violence would once again become part of life in America.

JFK was not killed by a military-industrial complex or a vast right-wing conspiracy. No group of men in suits sat around a table plotting his death. The forces that killed him were the same political ideas of the left that led young American men and women to cheer for the Viet Cong, plant bombs and wage war against their own country.

To understand why JFK died, you must understand the Weathermen and Leon Czolgosz who murdered President McKinley. You must understand the Atom Bomb Spies and Sacco and Vanzetti and a century of left-wing sabotage and terrorism in America.

It’s much safer to talk about magic bullets, than magical thinking ideologies that promise that a workers’ paradise is only a bomb away.

[……]

JFK was the martyr of the dangerously unstable new America that the left was bringing into being.

Three years after the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, an engineering student and another former marine would climb a tower at the University of Austin and open fire. The killing spree would become a starting point in an accelerating trend of mass killings.

The murder of John Lennon, another liberal icon, in a new decade that closed the door on the chaos of the counterculture, would be a death undignified by any larger meaning. From Charles Manson to Jim Jones, these were the mad horrors spawned by a damaged culture where the monsters and madmen were suddenly the only ones who understood the rules.

Kennedy was killed in a more innocent time when it was still possible to deny that the wave of change was not ushering in a brave new world, but the destruction of a culture that had kept the worst human instincts in check.

The real Kennedy conspiracy was an effort to suppress the basic truths of what had happened and to replace them with a recursive loop of conspiracy theories that could never resolve anything while convincing everyone that the basic truths of what happened could be safely ignored.

The conspiracy did not cover up the work of the secret organization that killed JFK, but the secret organizations of the left whose ideas led to his murder. The real JFK conspiracy concealed the deeper secret that the left is destructive and that its ideas carry a dark wind of violence.

The left cannot make history come out the way that it wants to, but it can always lie about it. Its myths of the past are tawdry attempts at refusing to learn the lessons of history so that it will be given the freedom to repeat its terrible mistakes.

Lee Harvey Oswald was the stepchild of the left’s destructive ideas. The same madness that led to Guyana and the bombing of the Pentagon had its day fifty years ago in Dallas.